Evidence and Research

Editor’s Note:Perhaps another piece of the puzzle for those still wondering why CIA chief George Tenet received Bush’s profuse thanks and the Medal of Freedom instead of 30 to life in Leavenworth.

The feds bungled a key opportunity to possibly nix the 9/11 terror plot, it was reported yesterday.

An Arabic-speaking FBI agent had requested information about a Jan. 5, 2000, Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, but the CIA never turned it over, The New Yorker reported.

The ambitious FBI detective, Ali Soufan, was so upset when he eventually got the information – after 9/11 – that he vomited.

Soufan, who had been investigating the 2000 attack on the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole that killed 17 sailors, realized the two plots were linked.

“And if the CIA had not withheld information from him he likely would have drawn the connection months before Sept. 11,” The New Yorker reported. The intelligence Soufan had sought showed that a one-legged jihadi named Khallad – a key Al Qaeda lieutenant linked to the Cole bombing – had attended the Malaysia meeting where the Sept. 11 plot was hatched.

According to the magazine, the CIA also learned in March 2000 that Al Qaeda operative Nawaf Alhazmi was in the United States, but the CIA never alerted the FBI. Alhazmi ended up on the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon.

The CIA may not have told the FBI about Alhazmi and another Qaeda operative, Khalid… Continue reading →

Since 9/11, numerous authors and researchers have drawn attention to training exercises being conducted or prepared for by the U.S. military and other government agencies at the time of the September 11 attacks. With names like Vigilant Guardian, Global Guardian, Timely Alert II, and Tripod, the question has arisen as to what connection these drills might have had with real-world events that morning.[1]

Editor’s Note:
Profuse thanks to astute 9/11 researcher and cooperativeresearch.org contributor Matthew Everett for allowing us to debut his highly thought-provoking study of the many military exercises preceding 9/11. Not only do these well-documented attack rehearsals belie huge swaths of the official story and the 9/11 Commission’s investigative zeal, their similar protocols offer a suggestive way to re-explore air defense dysfunction on the day itself.

Attention has also been drawn to exercises held prior to 9/11, often bearing an uncanny resemblance to the actual attacks. For example, soon after 9/11 the New Yorker reported: “During the last several years, the government regularly planned for and simulated terrorist attacks, including scenarios that involved multiple-plane hijackings.”[2]USA Today reported: “In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating … hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center.”[3]

As I will show in this essay, exercises also took place that bore a chilling resemblance to the… Continue reading →

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”

Published today, 12/18/06, in New York Megaphone, print run: 40,000, circulation: 66,700, NYC and Environs

by Sander Hicks

Daniel Hopsicker is an independent journalist working in Venice, Florida, outside the decommissioned military airstrips where three pilots from the 9/11 attack were trained. Hopsicker found the secret life of 9/11 ring-leader Mohamed Atta, who lead the operation by piloting the first plane into the World Trade Centre. Hopsicker found Atta’s American girlfriend, Amanda Keller. What she said broke new ground for truth-seekers worldwide. Atta had social connections and a party-boy life that indicated there was more to his story than people had been told. The American media establishment turned a blind eye to Hopsicker’s work, however. He has been called a “conspiracy theorist” in mainstream media in Florida, when he’s paid any attention at all.

Yet, in November, 2006, Hopsicker’s career turned a corner. Sources connected to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) told The Megaphone that his work began to be used to track Atta’s former associates. A researcher close to JTTF, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Megaphone that the “JTTF relied heavily on Daniel’s research on Atta and Amanda [Keller]. I faxed them pages from [Hopsicker’s book] Welcome to Terrorland.”

The lead paid off: on November 16, 2006, the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a “Terror Alert” for a certain Wolfgang Bohringer, a German-born, naturalized U.S. citizen who had reportedly partied with and protected Mohamed Atta in Florida. Bohringer’s name came up often in interviews with Amanda Keller.…

The Hidden History of 9-11-2001
Research in Political Economy
2006 Volume 23.
Ed. by Paul Zarembka

Governments have long found it useful to manufacture rationale for pursuing war and repression. The sinking of the Battleship Maine at the outset of the Spanish-American-Cuba War is the classic example. When President Harry Truman wanted to offer assistance to anti-Communist forces in Greece and Turkey in 1947, Republican senator Arthur Vandenburg promised his support if Truman would “scare the hell out of the American people.” In 1962, the Pentagon mounted Operation Northwoods, a plan involving false-flag actions, state-sponsored terrorism and the hijacking of planes on U.S. and Cuban soil designed to generate American public support for an invasion of Cuba. Then there was the case of the distraught young Iraqi woman testifying before U.S. Congressional hearings in the run-up to Gulf War I about babies being tossed out of incubators by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers.

The essays included in The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 lead to the conclusion that the attack on the World Trade Center may have been the biggest false-flag operation of them all. This 2006 issue of Research in Political Economy examines different aspects of 9-11, which, taken together, provide a serious challenge to those who dismiss the possibility that a government-based conspiracy was behind the events of 9-11.

The first section of the journal debunks the information provided by the U.S. government about the number and identity of the hijackers. Following that, other authors provide evidence indicating that it was impossible for the burning jet fuel from the planes to have caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers; that a series of military war games taking place on 9-11 caused confusion in military circles and prevented normal emergency response operations to kick in; and that the insider trading in the shares of the airlines that were hijacked that day lays open the possibility that huge sums were made by people who were aware in advance of what was coming.…

BBC World News started reporting that 7 World Trade Center had collapsed about 23 minutes before the building actually came down, as video of the news network’s live broadcast on September 11th shows.

Editor’s Note:
BBC World News announced WTC 7 had collapsed, well in advance of the actual event. Discovery by blogger prompts controversy. Angered counter-attack from BBC avoids issue: What was the source of the information? New 3-minute video compilation of the key points from the BBC broadcast, demonstrating foreknowledge of WTC 7 collapse. Read more for complete coverage of the last three days.

The skyscraper also known as the Salomon Brothers Building was still standing and clearly visible over the shoulder of a BBC reporter in New York, even as the network provided accurate, past- tense details of its collapse. Jane Standley’s live report was interrupted about five minutes before WTC 7 actually came down at 5:20pm EDT. A video clip establishing this anomaly was discovered on the archive.org news service and first pointed out to the public Monday by the blog writer 911veritas at 911blogger.com .

The ensuing controversy has prompted a swift, unusually angry response from the BBC, which however has failed to address the substantive issue: Apparently the network’s personnel were unfamiliar with WTC 7, which is excusable. They were however reporting information culled from a source with advance knowledge of the building’s collapse. Who was that source?

The answer may be essential to settling the long-standing dispute over… Continue reading →

WTC7: The Smoking Gun of 9/11: Video/audio clips relating to the collapse, in controlled demolition style, of the 47-story WTC Building 7. Includes interviews with people who were told the building would fall, BBC’s early reporting of the collapse, much more. Originally Posted by “Arie,” March 10, 2007.
16 min 24 sec.

When Matthew Rothschild, editor of the online magazine The Progressive, wrote an article called “Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracies, Already”, we all knew he was not talking about the conspiracy theory that the US government sells us to justify the expanding 9/11 Wars.[1] To the contrary, in writing that article Mr. Rothschild was selling that same theory himself. What he actually meant was that people should not question the US government’s story of terror because credentialed experts have been found to support it. But the fact is that the experts found to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 are predominantly those who profit from doing so. That’s not to say that all of these people were “part of the conspiracy”. But they are, whether consciously or not, a part of the cover-up. And that, of course, is the greater crime.

The Bush Administration employed a number of such credentialed experts to give us multiple explanations for the unprecedented destruction of three tall steel-framed buildings at the World Trade Center (WTC). Unfortunately, all of those explanations have proven to be false, and this fact reminds us that academic credentials don’t necessarily make a person more capable, or more likely, to tell the truth.

Exactly how they could find so many experts on the fire-induced collapse of tall buildings is not immediately clear, considering such an event had never happened before. But it did help that the questions were quickly framed as being… Continue reading →

Maybe the life of the nation is at stake, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe this is a time of unprecedented tyranny, and maybe it is simply what was just out of view on the same road we have been traveling for the last seventy years. Maybe this was a sea change and a quantum leap, or maybe it was neither. Regardless of the proper description of the event and this time in history, 9/11 has become an opportunity for enormous hope, great change, and an entirely new perspective.

Whether one is inclined to indulge, or even consider, the theoretical justifications for the massacre of 9/11 (the need to awaken a sleeping nation to the requirements of global hegemony), or not, the nature of the act and its perpetrators are matters of importance from every conceivable standpoint. The progress of the debate about that nature and those perpetrators has been enhanced by Debunking 9/11 Myths, edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan of Popular Mechanics magazine. Maybe not in ways the writers had hoped.

To the world at large, to the hungry masses yearning for points to be refuted or sustained, answers given, questions acknowledged if not answered, the appearance of a book by the mainstream which purports to establish, as the subtitle declares, “… Continue reading →

September 11, 2001: The French Knew Much About It
By Guillaume DasquiéLe Monde
Monday 16 April 2004

It’s an impressive mass of documents. From a distance, one would imagine a doctoral thesis. On closer inspection: nothing of the kind. Red stamps “Confidential-Defense” and “Strictly National Usage” on every page. At the top on the left, a royal blue logo: that of the DGSE, Direction générale des services extérieurs [General Directorate for Foreign Services], the French secret services. In total, 328 classified pages. Notes, reports, syntheses and summaries, maps, graphs, organization charts, satellite photos. All exclusively devoted to al-Qaeda, its leaders, its seconds-in-command, its hide-outs and training camps. Also to its financial supports. Nothing less than the fundamentals of the DGSE reports compiled between July 2000 and October 2001. A veritable encyclopedia.

At the end of several months of investigation of this very special documentation, we contacted DGSE headquarters. And on April 3, the present chief of staff, Emmanuel Renoult, received us there, within the confines of the Tourelles garrison in Paris. After thumbing through the 328 pages that we set on his desk, he can’t keep himself from deploring such a leak, all the while allowing us to understand that the packet represents virtually the entirety of DGSE production on the subject for this crucial period. On the other hand, it was impossible to draw the least comment from him on the substance of the material. Too sensitive.

It’s true that these secret services chronicles about al-Qaeda, with their various revelations, raise many questions.…

In late August 2001, when aggressive presidential action might have changed the course of U.S. history, CIA Director George Tenet made a special trip to Crawford, Texas, to get George W. Bush to focus on an imminent threat of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack only to have the conversation descend into meaningless small talk.

Alarmed CIA officials already had held an extraordinary meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10 to lay out the accumulating evidence of an impending attack and had delivered on Aug. 6 a special “Presidential Daily Brief” to Bush entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

“A few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events,” Tenet wrote in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm. “This was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the President graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna, none of which were native to Queens,” where Tenet had grown up.

Tenet’s trip to Crawford — like the July 10 meeting with Rice and the Aug. 6 briefing paper for Bush — failed to shock the administration out of its lethargy nor elicit the emergency steps that the CIA and other counterterrorism specialists wanted.

While Tenet and Bush made small talk about “the flora and the fauna,” al-Qaeda operatives put the finishing touches on their plans.…

Osama bin Laden may have chartered a plane that carried his family members and Saudi nationals out of the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks, said FBI documents released Wednesday.

The papers, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, were made public by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based group that investigates government corruption.

One FBI document referred to a Ryan Air 727 airplane that departed Los Angeles International Airport on September 19, 2001, and was said to have carried Saudi nationals out of the United States.

“The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian royal family or Osama bin Laden,” according to the document, which was among 224 pages posted online.

The flight made stops in Orlando, Florida; Washington, DC; and Boston, Massachusetts and eventually left its passengers in Paris the following day.

In all, the documents detail six flights between September 14 and September 24 that evacuated Saudi nationals and bin Laden family members, Judicial Watch said in a statement.

“Incredibly, not a single Saudi national nor any of the bin Laden family members possessed any information of investigative value,” Judicial Watch said.

“These documents contain numerous errors and inconsistencies which call to question the thoroughness of the FBI’s investigation of the Saudi flights.

“For example, on one document, the FBI claims to have interviewed 20 of 23 passengers on the Ryan International Airlines flight … on another document the FBI claims to have interviewed 15 to 22 passengers on the same flight.”

Asked about the documents’ assertion that either bin Laden or the Saudi royals ordered the flight, an FBI spokesman said the information was inaccurate.…

A grave miscarriage of justice is afoot. After years being withheld the Administration finally is forced to release the CIA’s IG Report on 9/11. While earlier news accounts said the report would be released in early September it was released in the middle of a Congressional recess, in the middle of a Summer break, thus insuring it will not receive the attention it deserves. Worse still is the conclusion in most press reports since its release that bolsters the official narrative, i.e., that all the myriad failures were simply due to ‘systemic failure’ and/or incompetence.

The circumstantial evidence running contrary to this conclusion is compelling and convincing.

It appears that Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar were being protected by higher ups in the CIA. Respected author Joe Trento has reported that they were working for Saudi Intelligence. Others reported the two were removed from the watchlist two days before 9/11. I don’t know if either was the case. It is clear, however, that there was a concerted effort to protect them, similar in some respects to the way authorities in FBI HQ refused to allow Rowley and company in Minnesota to go into Mousaoui’s laptop computer or how higher ups prevented Robert Wright in Chicago from going after the money trail of Yassin Al-Kadi (Qadi) who financed the software company Ptech and the terrorist group Hamas and who was later named a “Specially… Continue reading →

In August, 2006, Michael Bronner, a writer for Vanity Fair Magazine, received 30 hours of audiotape from the Northeast Air Defense Sector that chronicled their response on 9/11. Mr. Bronner released 10 minutes of audio from them in MP3 format.

In August, 2007, we received 120 hours of audiotape, and are proud to release them in their entirety to the public.

There are 18 WAV files, each one approximately 180 megabytes in size and six hours in length. To download them, you will need a Bittorrent program. BitLord is recommended for PC and Azureus is recommended for Mac.

67% also fault 9/11 Commission for not investigating anomalous collapse of World Trade Center 7

Kansas City, MO (Zogby International) September 6, 2007 – As America nears the sixth anniversary of the world-churning events of September 11, 2001, a new Zogby International poll finds a majority of Americans still await a Congressional investigation of President Bush’ and Vice President Cheney’s actions before, during and after the 9/11 attacks. Over 30% also believe Bush and/or Cheney should be immediately impeached by the House of Representatives.

The 911truth.org-sponsored poll also found that over two-thirds of Americans say the 9/11 Commission should have investigated the still unexplained collapse of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001.

WTC 7 housed the mayor’s emergency bunker and offices of the SEC, IRS, CIA and Secret Service and was not hit by any planes but still completely collapsed into its own footprint nearly eight hours after the Twin Tower attacks. FEMA did not explain this collapse, the 911 Commission ignored it, and the promised official study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is now 2 years overdue.

Janice Matthews, executive director of poll sponsor 911truth.org, observes: “The supermajority response to the WTC Building 7 question signals an increasing public concern about this remarkable event — up from 38% last year. We can perhaps credit this… Continue reading →

Some of you may have noticed that I have started a new “Who Is?” series with regard to 9/11. The reason I started this was because I thought too much emphasis was being placed on the physical aspects of 9/11, and not enough on the background information, the people who may have had something to do with it, the people who participated in the cover-up, the whistleblowers, the family members, the people who represent discrepancies, and so on.

I am using the work compiled by Paul Thompson at www.cooperativeresearch.org. There are links available to each of the stories sourced on the original website. Unfortunately, it’s just too much work to duplicate what Paul and others have done with regard to links. I want to thank them all for their tremendous efforts.

I also want people to know that the information provided is not the “end all/be all” of 9/11. However, it is most definitely an excellent starting point.

Editor’s Note: The following links have been expanded and updated as of 10/2/2008. Thanks Jon!

Here are the articles archived. As more are produced, they will be added here.

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF 9-11-2001: PROF. PAUL ZAREMBKA (SUNY Buffalo) — New video available

On August 9, 2007 at Chautauqua Institution, Paul Zarembka confronted Philip Zelikow. exec. director of the official 9/11 investigation, with a couple of uncensored questions. Professor Zarembka had done his homework. He is the editor of The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 . In this video, Zarembka outlines the book’s chapters: What we now know about the 9-11 hijackers (Jay Kolar); Initiation of the 9-11 operation, with evidence of insider trading beforehand (Zarembka); The destruction of the World Trade Center: why the official account can’t be true (David Ray Griffin); The military drills on 9-11: bizarre coincidence or something else? (Four Arrows aka Don Jacobs); Terrorism and Statecraft: Al-Qaeda and western covert operations after the Cold War (Nafeez Mossaddeq Ahmed); September 11 as Machiavellian State Terror (David MacGregor); Making History: the compromised 9-11 Commission (Bryan Sacks); Islamophobia and the War on Terror: the continuing pretext for US imperial conquest (Diana Ralph). Filmed Aug 9, 2007, Chautauqua, NY. See also abstract of Zarembka’s book

27 min interview with Prof. Zarembka

You can watch a shorter 10 minute interview that includes the August 9, 2007 questions asked of Phillip Zelikow here:

From 9/24 to 10/1/07 I traveled throughout Louisiana and Texas, with reporter Jordan Green, investigating the death of 9/11 researcher Dr. David Graham.

Our suspicions were validated: there’s a huge story here. It’s almost overwhelming. The best way to summarize is to publish my complaint filed last week with the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General.

If you support an investigation into the death of Dr. Graham, please say so, in the comments section, at the end. (Please send me your email, too, I may be doing some sort of activism around this. Mine is sander [at] voxpopnet.net)

Editor’s Note:
Readers: Please take action to support an investigation into Dr. Graham’s death, as suggested by the author.

October 11th, 2007

Office of the Inspector General
Department of Justice
1425 New York Ave NW
Suite 7100
Washington, DC 20005

Dear Inspector,

I am writing to request a special investigation into possible FBI corruption inside the Shreveport, LA. office. I have been researching the strange death of Dr. David M. Graham since I was passed his unpublished manuscript, last spring. This case is of the utmost importance, and is about to receive serious media attention.

A week ago, I returned from a fact-finding mission in Shreveport, New Orleans and Houston. Alongside reporter Jordan Green, I met many of Dr. Graham’s surviving friends and coworkers. Every one of them indicated that Dr.… Continue reading →